Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Judd

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, if the Government think it appropriate that the private disputes of Russian oligarchs should be settled in our courts, how much more appropriate is it that poor people in countries such as the Côte d’Ivoire, who have been treated utterly disgracefully by a large international corporation, should also be able to seek remedy in the British courts? Should we not be proud to make that a possibility?

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is to be congratulated on having persevered so well and firmly with this cause, right up to Third Reading. I remember in my early days as director of Oxfam that I was in north-west Brazil where, having travelled overnight in a rickety bus, I arrived in this very poor town. Around the tower of the church, there was a banner in Portuguese which said, “Prison bars will not prevent the truth escaping”. When I, together with the field director, probed to try to find out what had happened and what was wrong, evidently a greedy land grabber had been bribing the judge with cattle and the judge had repeatedly ordered these people off their land. They had no social insurance—nothing. They had no means of surviving but to go on farming the land they traditionally farmed. In the end, because they resisted, he threw them and the local secretary of the peasants’ association into prison for good measure.

I had gone with my colleague to discuss agriculture—wells, tools, seed and irrigation—but what became very clear was that these people were preoccupied totally with justice. They wanted to have some resources to be able to go to the regional court and put their case before it. I can remember us sitting over some beer and doing some rough calculations, and reckoning that we could find a bit of money to help support them to go off to the regional court. One of my best moments in those formative years as director of Oxfam was when I heard at headquarters in Oxford that having taken their case before the regional court, the local judge was in prison and they were back on their land.

I tell this story because I have repeatedly found in my work with the Third World that what holds people back is a lack of justice and fairness, and what they are wanting is a fair crack of the whip. If this is true within the context of their own societies, when we move into a globalised society—with the vast power of the biggest international companies and the almost limitless resources that they have at their disposal for legal undertakings, cases and the rest—the case becomes even more obvious. I am very unhappy with this whole Bill, and have been from the beginning, because it is about limiting access to justice when surely a cause in a civilised society is to increase access to justice. If we have a serious commitment to the people of the Third World, as the Government keep demonstrating that they want to have, nothing is more important than ensuring that they can get access to justice. I really will be very despairing if the Government, even at this 11th hour, cannot respond to what the noble Baroness has argued.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Judd

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I fully support the intentions of these amendments. I admired the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, but seek clarification from him. I have a question about feasibility and practicality. I am not sure whether it is intended that the requirements in these amendments should extend to magistrates’ courts as well as to the other courts. However, if one considers the circumstances in which the magistrates’ courts were operating last summer, following the riots, when they transacted an extraordinary volume of cases, worked under extreme pressure and sat until late at night, I wonder how realistic it is to lay upon those courts the requirements that these amendments would lay. I had misgivings about the magistrates’ courts working in that fashion but I recognise that what they did at that time was seen by the public as entirely appropriate in a situation of exceptional crisis. Perhaps what I am really saying is that there is no substitute for having enough courts that are sufficiently resourced and a probation service that is well enough resourced, and for the courts to do their work as far as possible screened from the pressures of the media and politics. However, that is a rather fanciful state of affairs to desire.

I therefore simply ask the noble Lord, whose purposes I thoroughly endorse, to explain, if he will, how he envisages these requirements actually working in practice when the courts are under severe pressure.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I must apologise for not having been in my place when the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, was moving his amendment; however, as I have put my name to the amendment, I hope that with the leave of the House I might make just two observations.

First, it has been said that it is not appropriate to tell the courts what to do because they know what to do. That is a fine sentiment in some ways, and I pay due respect to the sincere professionals who make the courts system work. The issue is whether the court has enough information in front of it to make a proper decision in view of the circumstances and consequences of what it may decide. The amendments are therefore dealing with a rather different point.

I also want to make this observation: of course, when the court has before it someone who is about to be sentenced, I am sure that there is a punishment to be made; but if we are sensible and rational beings, and the courts are working well, it is also essential right from that moment to be thinking about the rehabilitation of the individual so that they can become a positive citizen. That is why the quality and depth of the probation service’s report is crucial; otherwise, we slip into a sort of factory system of justice whereby there is an automatic response to a case. One has to try all the time to look at the individual and at how the sentence can be tailored to enable that citizen not only to be punished but to start the process of rehabilitation and join society as a responsible citizen.

If we are concerned about future crime, there is nothing more absurd and wasteful than not to take fully into account the implications for the dependants, because we may otherwise find that the court, by not having paid sufficient attention to the needs of the dependants, has inadvertently contributed to the next generation of offenders in that family.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Judd

Wednesday 18th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I, too, would like to say a word in support of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He has raised very important points. Surely, what he has argued for is self-evidently right in principle. As the noble Lord suggested, public authorities are almost by definition powerful in relation to citizens. It is, of course, incumbent on all public authorities to act lawfully. Ignorance of the law on the part of a public authority should be no excuse for that public authority any more than it is on the part of the citizen. Therefore, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would repair an omission in the drafting. Otherwise, it would be possible under the Bill as drafted for the public authority to say, “We did not realise. We did not mean to do this. It was not intentional. It was not done knowingly”. Or it could tell lies, but it will be caught that way. If the public authority said that it was sorry and that it had made a mistake of law, it certainly seems to me that the citizen ought to be entitled to some redress.

Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is also very valuable. From time to time a number of us may be rather concerned at the readiness and apparent arbitrariness with which people seeking immigration status can be detained. It must be beyond question that deprivation of liberty, whether or not it was deliberate or dishonest, is a harm. Therefore, it is surely right that the two amendments that the noble Lord has proposed should go in the Bill. They make evident good sense and they are proper.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I, too, commend this amendment for very serious attention. In the economic pressures under which we are operating and which are very much a factor in everything we are considering under this legislation, it seems to me that this provision is another example of a heavy penalty falling on the most vulnerable and those in the worst possible psychological situation. Sometimes we need to break away from our legal preoccupations and think of the predicament of the individual. They go through an extraordinary nightmare in many of the circumstances that we are discussing. We are discussing an authority of the state doing something which is a denial of everything that the state says it is about. In our immigration and other policy, we expect people to give undertakings and to prove that they understand the culture of our society and why it matters. Here is a provision which is an absolute denial of what this country is about—the deprivation of liberty. I would have thought that if we realised such a thing had happened, we would fall over backwards to put it right and to give a positive indication of our disapproval of what had happened and our sympathy for the individual concerned.

I hope that I may be allowed to make a wider point. I sometimes think that in our preoccupation with specific legislation we fail to make connections. All the time we are worried about stability, terrorism and the appeal of extremists. However, this kind of thing plays into the hands of agitators who portray these issues as examples of the hypocrisy of our society. It is hypocritical for an agent of the state to do something that is a denial of what the state is about and for the state to give no assistance in making sure that the wrong is put right. A terribly important principle has been raised in this amendment.